Roald Dahl (17 page)

Then there was a dog-racing story, “Mr. Feasey,” which came at the end of the book, after the three related country-life pieces which
The New Yorker
had rejected
³⁴
—although of these, Harold Strauss would have liked “The Ratcatcher” left out and encouraged Dahl to tone it down. Strauss also disliked, and persuaded Dahl to omit, the anti-German story, “The Sword,”
³⁵
which he said he couldn't understand, although there is nothing at all mysterious about it.
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And he got him to reduce “The Wish”—about a child's obsessive imaginary horrors—to a fifth of its original length.

On the strength of Knopf's backing, some other pieces which
Dahl had unsuccessfully offered to
The New Yorker
were now accepted by various magazines, to appear just before the book's publication in the autumn of 1953:
Harper's
took “Lamb to the Slaughter”;
Town and Country
, the story about a commuter's obsession with schoolboy bullying.
Collier's
, which had already printed two stories intended for the book (“Man from the South” and “Poison”), now published “Nunc Dimittis.”

“Nunc Dimittis” is about an artist, John Royden, who likes to paint married women in the nude, and then, in a kind of slow-motion reverse striptease, adds their clothes, sitting by sitting, until the portrait is suitable to be taken home. The narrator, Lionel, is a middle-aged bachelor. Lionel has many women friends but never becomes entangled with them. He is discontented, frustrated, regretful about something, in a way that amounts to eccentricity. He is also a connoisseur. He says that owning a good collection of paintings (in a long list of artists, he mentions Matthew Smith) can create a frightening atmosphere of suspense around a man such as himself—“frightening to think that he has the power and the right, if he feels inclined, to slash, tear, plunge his fist” through the canvases he possesses.

For some time Lionel has been taking out a young woman called Janet de Pelagia. His friends are beginning to wonder whether he will marry at last. But one of them, an older woman, tells him that Janet has complained that he bores her, endlessly taking her to the same restaurant for dinner and going on about paintings and antique china. Lionel decides to avenge himself. He commissions John Royden to paint Janet's portrait. When he gets it home, he patiently takes off the top layer with turpentine. At a large dinner party to which he has invited her, he unveils the picture in front of everyone: “Janet in her underclothes, the black brassière, the pink elastic belt, the suspenders, the jockey's legs.”
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The story may have been prompted by Goya's famous pair of paintings
The Naked Maja
and
The Clothed Maja
, which were
favorites of Matthew Smith's. Dahl was also fascinated by the jealous upheavals in which Smith's own portraits of women sometimes involved him (one husband, a man in public life, angrily made his wife sell the paintings of her by Smith, with whom she had had an affair).
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The unctuous Royden doesn't resemble Smith, and Lionel is in obvious ways unlike Dahl: he is older, much richer, and the story makes great play of his sexual inexperience. Despite all that, it isn't clear how far Dahl stands from Lionel's physical revulsions—at John Royden's bearded mouth, “wet and naked, a trifle indecent,” or at Janet's bandy legs, or at the older woman's “loose and puckered” face with its folds of fat and its mouth pinched “like a salmon's”
³⁹
—passages which were left out in the version published by
Collier's
magazine.

Perhaps if Patricia Neal had read “Nunc Dimittis” she would have given more thought to her friends' warnings, but she was never a great reader. The wedding was held at Trinity Church, New York, on a stifling July day in 1953. Dahl tore out the lining of his suit to make it cooler. Neal wore pink chiffon. Her friend the actress Mildred Dunnock was matron of honor, Charles Marsh best man. Because of temporary British restrictions on the amount of money people were allowed to spend on foreign travel, Dahl's family would have had difficulty in coming, so in fairness to both sides, the occasion was kept for friends only. But the Marshes assured Roald's mother that she would like Pat, whom he was planning to take home to England at the end of the honeymoon.

Dahl arranged their trip to Europe with enthusiasm. (Patricia Neal says dryly, “He had an enormous appreciation for anything he generated.”
⁴⁰
) They drove a Jaguar convertible up through Italy from Naples, and on via Switzerland and the French Riviera. Dahl wanted to visit various famous acquaintances such as Rex Harrison along the way, and as early as May had suggested
to Matthew Smith that he might like to join them.
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As things turned out, they didn't see him until they reached England in August.

At Great Missenden, the couple were to stay with Else and John and their children, whose pictures had made such an impression on Pat. The arthritic Sofie Dahl, walking with the aid of two sticks, came down the drive to meet them and simply said, “Hello.” Straight out of Broadway, Pat was surprised by the fact that “there was no kiss. No embrace,” either from Sofie or from any of the rest of the family. She soon learned that some Northern Europeans of the time had their own forms of welcome. After supper, Alfhild's husband, Leslie Hansen, entertained everyone with an impromptu display of fart lighting.

In the following days there was a party where she met other relatives, friends, and neighbors: Roald's half sister, Ellen, and half brother, Louis; Matthew Smith; the local GP, Dr. Brigstock, and his wife; the cookery writer Elizabeth David; and many others. Dahl's youngest sister, Asta, had just given birth to her third child, Peter: Roald and Pat drove across to their house in High Wycombe to see them. Meanwhile, the two Mrs. Dahls began to take one another's measure.

Sofie had been wondering how well Pat would get on with her unusually close-knit family.
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It was a reasonable anxiety for both of them. Patricia Neal never pretended to be a domestic kind of woman. She was used to getting up late and spending the morning in her dressing gown, talking on the phone to friends. The contrast between her Hollywood habits and the sterner regime of a Norwegian housewife in rural Buckinghamshire quickly made for tensions, which Roald felt if anything more keenly than his mother. Sofie said that her concern was more whether her son would make his wife happy than the other way around. She wrote to the Marshes that she hoped Roald would be kind to Pat. “He is not easy to live with,” she told them. Nor, she recalled, had his father been.
⁴³

To Pat herself, her mother-in-law came across as critical and
forbidding, but one thing they had in common was a liking for babies. Roald was unusually devoted to children, and good with them, Sofie thought.
⁴⁴
Pat had wanted a child ever since she began her affair with Gary Cooper, and when she told Dashiell Hammett about her forthcoming marriage, her main concern seemed to be not with her prospective husband but over what to call her first child, whether Neal Dashiell or Dashiell Neal. Hammett wrote to his daughter that it had better hurry up and be born, “regardless of which sex it picks out … or she'll go out and adopt one because this waiting around nine months might be well enough for some folks but it's a long time if you really want to play at motherhood.”
⁴⁵

As it turned out, she had to wait almost two years, and the couple's frustration and anxiety on this score may have contributed to their difficulties in settling down together. There was also the problem of Roald's need to dominate. Friends of Pat's were horrified by how demanding, perfectionist, and intolerant he was with her, and how he always seemed to be putting her down.
⁴⁶
Measured by show-business levels of kissing and embracing, he, like the rest of his family, could also seem cold. But there was what seemed to Pat a harsh vein of prudishness which revealed itself on the honeymoon, when Dahl saw her looking at herself naked in the mirror, and, in a reaction that would have left many yearning moviegoers aghast if they could have been there, shouted, “My God, will you stop that! Put some clothes on.”

As soon as they got back to New York, they set about moving from their separate apartments into 44 West Seventy-seventh Street, a fantastical gothic block next to Central Park and overlooking the American Museum of Natural History. Rents were lower on that side of the city, so they could afford a small extra bedroom for Dahl to use as a study. The move was an opportunity for clearing out, and he urged Neal to sell her pictures, which he disliked, as well as jewels she had been given by Gary Cooper. Her past relationships were more of a trouble to him
than his to her. She says that she was still hankering after Cooper, and that Dahl was also jealous of, or simply disliked and was bored by, many of her confidants, particularly her loyal future agent, Harvey Orkin, a close friend of Cooper's, of whom Dahl complained that he was both loud-mouthed and Jewish.
⁴⁷

Nor did he have much time for her family, whom they visited together for the first time that Christmas, almost six months after the wedding. Pat's mother was an unadventurous Southerner, limited in her interests and irritated by the social changes around her—particularly black emancipation. Dahl simply couldn't get along with her. A friend who later saw them together excuses him: “He was no snob. He loved the famous and he loved earls and all that kind of thing, but he was just as fond of village people. What he did mind was if people were intolerant and parochial.” Relations weren't eased, on this first meeting, when Dahl suggested that his young brother-in-law, Pete, instead of going to university should leave school and start up a gas station. No one could have been expected to understand that to Dahl, this represented a romantic ideal.
⁴⁸
But the Neals may have been right to have suspected another motive. Ever since her father died, Pat had paid for her brother's education. She continued to do so until he finished university and became a teacher.
⁴⁹

Dahl was feeling bloody-minded anyway. Soon after their stay with her family, he suddenly told Pat that he wanted a divorce and wrote a long letter to the Marshes explaining what was wrong.
⁵⁰
He liked Pat for her courage and frankness, he told them, but they had different friends, no interests in common, and little to talk about. Beyond that, of course, there was also “the question of one's mother.” All his life, Dahl said, he had watched Sofie—like Claudia Marsh or “any other good wife”—organizing the household, making sure it was kept clean and tidy, and, up to a point, acting as what he called her husband's servant. However capable and self-reliant the husband was, Dahl said, it was natural to a man to be waited upon. But Pat “is not able to bring herself to this.”

One difference, of course, was that Neal was the main money-earner. Dahl's mother had never gone out to work, and no one would have expected her to. As for Claudia Marsh, Pat saw her as a kind of geisha—which is indeed how Mrs. Marsh herself, from the perspective of the 1990s, now amusedly describes her role at that time.
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But from Dahl's point of view, among the things which annoyed him was that when he was writing, Neal seemed to think he wasn't doing anything. So she stayed in bed, talking on the phone, while he made the coffee and got his own lunch out of a can. He accepted, he said, that it was hard to be both a wife and a career woman, but he supposed that those who managed it did so by doubling their efforts.

Some of Pat's friends believe that his expectations were at bottom more complex than this. According to one, Dahl made conflicting demands, with the unconscious but powerful hope that the person at the other end would fail at least one of them, thereby guaranteeing his own supremacy. “One message was, you must go out and be an actress and be a success, and the other was, you must stay at home and be a good mother.” And in this, there was another double bind. They wanted a child—but was the marriage fit to support one? Dahl said that it wasn't, and used the danger of pregnancy as a reason for them to separate.
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Naturally enough, when he relented and asked Pat to go on holiday with him, she refused. But she had agreed to join the Marshes in Jamaica, and Dahl asked their advice about whether he should come, too. It would, he said, be cruel and stupid to draw out a process which he thought was bound, sooner or later, to end in failure. Charles told him that both he and Pat were thinking too much about themselves and too little about each other.
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Yes, Roald should certainly come to Jamaica—but for a vacation, not to “wash emotional dishes.” Charles himself was not well enough, he hinted, to stand for that. But he told Dahl that “service” was a mutual matter and that he was in danger of turning into a martinet.

Patricia Neal didn't know about the exchange of letters, or that Marsh had given Dahl any advice.
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A shrewd arbitrator, the older man encouraged each side to think that the other was probably right, after all. Certainly his advice to her couldn't have been more favorable to her husband. Dahl should handle all the money, Marsh told her, even if it was she who was earning most of it. And she should do all the cooking and housework. She accepted what he said, and for a while the formula worked, more or less.

Within a year of suggesting it, Marsh contracted cerebral malaria as the result of a mosquito bite in Jamaica.
⁵⁵
For the remaining nine years of his life, he was in effect speechless. His collapse would have been a worse blow to the couple but for the fact that he had helped them to give each other more support. Patricia went back to New York with Roald. He seemed more easygoing, she more house proud. A new gynecologist diagnosed blocked fallopian tubes and cleaned them out. By the summer of 1954, Pat was pregnant. Meanwhile, in the Valley of the Dahls, Roald's family had been busy on their behalf. A house was found on the edge of Great Missenden, where Roald had suggested that he and Pat might spend their summers.
⁵⁶
Little Whitefield, as Gipsy House was then called, stands on its own in a country lane, an ancient drove road which runs from a medieval abbey turned country mansion, under the railway bridge, uphill into a beech wood. The house had three bedrooms and five acres of land, full of old fruit trees: apples, pears, cherries, plums. The price was £4,500, of which Sofie Dahl supplied one half, Pat, according to her own account, the other.